Defying his parents, Robinson Crusoe goes to sea. He is captured by pirates but escapes to Brazil. He makes a fortune using slave labour to grow tobacco and sugar. He sails to Africa to bring back more slaves but is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Everyone else is drowned. For over twenty years he lives alone. He learns to hunt and fish and make shelter. Then the cannibals arrive. Will this be the end of his adventure – or the chance to escape?

Among the crew is Ishmael, the novel's narrator, ordinary sailor, and extraordinary reader. Digressive, allusive, vulgar, transcendent, the story Ishmael tells is above all an education: in the practice of whaling, in the art of writing. Expanding to equal his ‘mighty theme’ – not only the whale but all things sublime – Melville breathes in the world's great literature. Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written by an American.

Defying his parents, Robinson Crusoe goes to sea. He is captured by pirates but escapes to Brazil. He makes a fortune using slave labour to grow tobacco and sugar. He sails to Africa to bring back more slaves but is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island. Everyone else is drowned. For over twenty years he lives alone. He learns to hunt and fish and make shelter. Then the cannibals arrive. Will this be the end of his adventure - or the chance to escape?